How to model & texture a tree in Maya | Maya 2016 Tutorial

hey there beautiful people in this video tutorial what we're going to look at is making a game ready tree so we're going to go about making the tree that you can see on screen and it's going to be game ready so we're going to make sure that it's low poly enough to go into a game engine so we're going to look at the modeling process we're going to take a really good look at the texturing process we're going to make sure that everything is properly UV mapped and by the time we're done we'll hopefully have something looks really cool if you are one of my fabulous pavement supporters then the textures that I make in this video I will make available to you so that if you just want to put the tree together yourself quickly you can do that if however you aren't one of my patreon followers you absolutely can be the link will be on screen or in the video description and you know check it out but if not you can get the textures from texture calm unedited and you'll just have to do a bit of work so we're going to go through first step now so for me I always start my trees with the branches and so you can see here in this folder I've already been out to the internet and I've got myself some beautiful pine branches and I've got pine bark texture so what I do first is get these four pine branches onto one texture map so we'll go into Photoshop for that we're going to go file new and we're going to call this branches effuse now I had caps lock on mug branches underscore dick views that's better okay now the size well do this as a to K H so that's 2048 by 2048 wicked and everything's good so let's look okay on that okay the first thing I'm going to do just because I like knowing that I'm getting my full screen real estate Express ctrl + 0 just to make sure that's full full-size and now I'm going to go to file open and we're going to open those other four images so let's get those all open they're all open across the top I'm just going to copy them over one at a time onto the kind of mass of the image so we'll start with this one so I'm going to press ctrl a and ctrl C so I select it all and then I copied it and then we're going to go how do I get back across there where's my main what's going on here I never did branch's diffuse right so I'll paste this one onto here lovely and we're just going to position it somewhere off the side I want to try and make as good use of the tissue space as I can so I'm gonna resize that a little bit okay so that's the first one on there okay now we need another one so we'll get this one ctrl a ctrl C back to my main diffuse and I'm going to do ctrl V to paste that will put it on a new layer for me which is handy so that I can resize things and move things around independently at this stage okay so this one kind of looks like and it wants to go up in the top corner I think okay let's resize that so I'm just trying to make sure I'm getting the most out of this space that I've got okay so I'm done with that one I've forgotten here I haven't got this one yet so ctrl a ctrl C back into my main image paste that in where's this one going to go it's this cheeky little I'm going to go up here a reckon ctrl T to resize and we'll get it fairly close something like that okay so I'm now done with that one and this is my final one ctrl a ctrl C get this one into here ctrl V to paste and this one I think what I'm going to do is real take this one around so I press ctrl + T again to turn on the free transform tool and I'll put that one there so I can see straight away that I'm not really getting the best use of space out of this so I'm going to do a little bit of moving around so let's just move that one down to the bottom ok so I think we can do a little bit better with this one so what happens if I rotate this around mm maybe okay yep I think I'm going to do now so I'm going to have this one I'm going to rotate this one around as well don't know if I needed to rotate them around but it feels good to do it so this one can be a little bit smaller because it's going to be a smaller branch and this one nope and this one we're going to flip around this way and we'll move it over here like that it's not bad I can still do a little bit better somewhere I know I can okay so we're going to move this one up here sort of into the middle and I know that that now means that I can get a little bit more out of this one that's better yeah that's not bad so I'm fairly happy with that I probably could pick this a little bit tighter but it's a 2k texture and I'll get away with it and I don't want to spend all day doing this because it's not a great interesting part of the video is it so we've got all those images ready to go so that can now be imported as one texture map when we get to the Maya part it was still a little bit of setting up that we need to do to make this work as a tree branch texture so what I'm going to do first of all is just flatten this image so I've selected all layers at once I'm going to right click and do merge layers so they're now all be eautifully merged together and then what I'm going to do is create a new layer so this one is going to be my alpha and if you've never used our fillets before what they essentially are are black and white images that tell 3d applications such as Maya or Unreal Engine which parts of an image you can see and which parts of image you want to be see-through so for something like a tree branch it's really useful but we need to set that up first so on my layer 4 which is the one with all the branches on I'm going to what I want to do instead of the magic wand tool I'm going to use quick selection on what I'm doing is I'm just trying to select everything as you can see but hopefully when I let go it's just pinged to the branches because there's nothing else on those layers so that's really good and then I'm going to go to my alpha layer so you see I've still got that selection marquee is it called a marquee the wiggly line is still there right so the bit that I want to be seen needs to be white you can see that my two colors here that I have black-and-white so I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut to fill this with the color I want so it's Alt + delete to fill that part of the image with white and everything that I don't want to be showing through I want to be black so to do that I'm going to go to select and in this so now everything apart from the space with the bridges in is selected I'm going to press ctrl + delete and that'll fill with the background color and you can see now I've got quite a handsome looking after my 4 press ctrl + D to deselect this is the very pretty image that leaves me with which is spot-on that's exactly what I wanted it to look like so this is no good here though it's just in the way it won't actually function as an alpha channel to make it be an alpha channel we need to go to channels which is just next to layers you can see we've got RGB which is showing all three of the color channels at once and we need an alpha Channel but it's not there so here if you're unlace this would be create a new layer between channels it creates a new channel and because there isn't an alpha Channel that's what it'll create a new Alpha Channel so we're going to go to alpha layer we're gonna press ctrl + ctrl C to select everything on that layer back into channels make sure you're on the Alpha layer and then ctrl + V to paste that now is given as an alpha channel that is going to be so amazing later when we need to use it okay so that bits done so you can see because we've been working on the optional that's the bit that's visible but we don't want that to be visible or want the RGB to be visible again so I'm going to turn that on whenever you're previewing your alpha and the bits that are going to be see-through shortbread just in case you're wondering why that was red so I'm just going to kill that so don't need to be able to see it now so that's the Alpha setup that's ace so the last thing I really need to do I can bin this alpha layer now it's done its job I want to make sure that I have a color around the edge because I want to make sure that if the Alpha Channel if there's a bit of bleeding going on around the edge that it's still showing the right color so we need to set that up now so I'm going to create a new layer and this is going to go behind and the layer with the branches on and we need to get some color on here so I'm just going to lay down a kind of green cloth so I'm just going to sample kind of a middle-of-the-road green I think that appears in most of the branches and I'm going to press ctrl + D just to turn that selection off and Alt + delete to fill and that's that's fine that's good enough what I will also do though because I just want to make sure that the colors match as much as possible because I'm gonna duplicate this layer a couple of times like that just by dragging it onto the new layer icon and then I'm going to put a bit of a blur on these and that will just spill these colors out a little bit over the edge around there so it should be the matching color that we get which is what we want so I'm going to go to filter down to blur and I'll be using Gaussian blur because it's my favorite type of blur if you haven't got a favorite type of blur you should get one okay and we just want to make sure that we're not blurring it too much and hopefully you can see in the background that it's just causing these edges to be a little bit if I just flick it on and off you see it's just blending a little bit better with the background which is the effect I'm going for so I'll do it on that layer and I'm just going to repeat it on this layer just to make the effect a little bit stronger so when I do that blur again Gaussian blur okay let's see what effect this is having so you can see is adding when I flipped it on enough is adding to the blurred effect that we get which is what we want I might blur this one out a little bit further maybe not maybe not like that yeah that's okay so I click on OK on that and I think that will do it for me I'm happy with that so we're now going to save this out as a texture and then we'll move into Maya just start building the tree so let's get this saved now we need to save this out properly otherwise it will be no use to us so file save as so the first thing I want to do is save like a master version of the texture so if there anything wrong with it I can come back into Photoshop the one that's got all the layers and I can make adjustments so I'm going to call this one branches master and that's going to stay as a Photoshop file so I'll click on save and that's that one done and then I want a compressed version which is flattened so only has one layer but also has an alpha Channel so we can use that one in Maya so I'm going to go to file save as this one's going to be a Targa the target is my favorite image format again you should have a favorite image format we're going to call this on branches if fuse okay now this is important when you're working with a target file and you need the Alpha channel to come through make sure alpha channels is selected so save that what you also need to do is this target from this box will come up and you've got a choice how many bits per pixel do you want and if you want the upper channel you need to choose 32 24 bits M is RGB is 8 times 3 so 8 bits per color and then 32 is another 8 bits which is another color which is your alpha Channel so we need to have that one select it as well and we'll click on OK so that is the branches setup what we need to do now is get into Maya and start building the branches in 3d okay so here we are in Maya the first thing we're going to do is put down a copy of those branches we've just made so we can trace them with new shapes so the way we'll do that is with our polygon plane maybe it is and I'm just going to scale this up now the scale or working at the moment doesn't really matter but by default the units that you work with in Maya are centimeters so if something is ten it's ten centimeters so I'm going to be making a tree that's about seven meters high so I'm going to be choosing 700 for the height when we get there so it won't matter yet because we can scale these leaves up but that's the kind of scale we'll be working with so we need to know that right so here is our new plane so I'm going to go to my channel box and I'm just going to give this a name I'm just going to call it reference and not that it really matters but I don't want any subdivisions on it so I'm just going to change both of those to one under inputs and I'm happy with that right we need to get that image on this so let's right-click assign new material lumber on it and it is lumber two and then for the color I'm going to choose file and pantry textures we're going to use branches diffuse and you can see because we put that alpha channel on and the branches are nice and see-through so they're going to look a so when we use them later okay so let's click on open right what you need to remember is that if your textures don't show up it's because you haven't turned texturing on so the way you do that is with this little icon here and that will show them or if you're a keyboard shortcut user as I am you can just press six on your keyboard and that will make them show up so this is our reference for the branches that we're going to create now that isotope we can get onto making four different branches okay so we're going to go for the first branch I think I'm going to go for this bottom corner here so what I'm going to do is create a new polygon plane again this is going to need to be sized up let's remove this just being roughly the right place okay my channel box I'm going to name this ranch one and I'm going to get rid of the subdivisions again because I want to put these in manually to make sure that I've got as few as possible with this being a game ready tree we need to make sure that we're not throwing any polygons away so that's what we need to do right so what I'm going to do to make this easier on myself is go into the top view the zoom out a little bit press six so I can see my materials turn the grid off as well because it's in my way and I'm going to put in some subdivisions manually yeah what I'm going to do before this becomes a pain is I'm going to put this onto a layer so I've slept in my background layers create layer from selected I'm going to call this reference this is my reference layer in fact I'm going to call it let L underscore reference because if you've already got something called referencing you're seeing it won't let you call the layer reference anyways we'll click on save and we're going to change that V to ah not that V this P no that's the third one oh if only I knew I was doing so when it change that to an R which means we can see it but we can't select it so that stuff it in the commit being a pain right let's get this sorted then so on a girl into vertex mode and I move these vertices up to the top I'm going to move these vertices down to the bottom and I need to now make some decisions on where I need to put extra edges to trace the outline of this branch without using more than I need to so we're going to use the mesh tools new phallus user from here so this is the multi cut tool and the way to get an edge loop so you can see it will just let you kind of cut through a shape which is nice but if you hold control then it won't support nice straight edge loops in which is what we want so the first thing we're going to do is put an edge loop straight down the middle always straight down the middle as we can get it because we want to be able to do that with the branches to make the lot of the draping so each one of these branches will have a line down the middle that's really important and now I need to look at where I have to put in additional edge so I'm just going to try and put one about here where I think is about the kind of the furthest that the branch kicks out and I'm going to try and get away with just using this many vertices to Tracy if I need to put some more in a minute that's what I'll do but we'll do a little bit of vertex movement now to try and get the shape of this tree so we're going to put that one there at the base this one needs to kind of kick out here and this one about there so I'm just trying to be careful not to cut any of the the branches off that one's going to go about there that's the farthest it kicks out I'm going to bring this one in as much as I can get away with which is quite a lot about there I think so you see I've got as close as I can without quite anything off or using too many vertices okay this one here we can see the point this kicks out furthest is just here so I'll drop that one there we'll use this one here I think we've already done this only Alice's good as that want to get in I think and we'll just bring this one in as well to create a bit of a point okay so we need to get these edges as close as we can because these are going to be the transparent areas and the way that game engines work is that the more of these transparent layers you have on top of each other the higher the shader complexity of a given level gets and so if you have too many of these kind of that you're looking through it slows it down so we don't want to have too much overlapping too much overlapping transparent space so that's why we're tracing this out because you you could argue that we could have done this with one face or two if we just wanted to make it go like that where we've used four yeah but this this is the better way to do it so and there is our first branch and I'm happy with that okay let's do another one we'll do this one here what I'm going to do for this one actually is I'm going to duplicate this one because it's actually not a bad starting point I will just scale it down a little bit modify center pivot there we go right so let's do this one next right put it into vertex mode why is this one called branch one which wonder let's move punch two waves okay so vertex mode let's try and get this shape so that we're happy with it so I'm going to go up out there I want this one pretty much at the base that one's going to go just about there this one if you can come in a bit further or you sure can this one obviously needs to come down and this one is going to go to about there oh that's not bad at all yeah so now you can see we've now got two branches done right at this stage I'm not going to bore you with repeating the process another two times I'll leave you to do that yourself and we'll skip through me doing it mine I might do the forwarding thing I do like a bit of editing anyway so we'll reconvene when we've got all these branches done we'll move on to the next step you okay welcome back so you should be able to see from my screen that I've got the outline of the four branches that I want to use what we need to do now is texture each of these and make sure that the UV maps are done properly so we'll start with this bad boy over here and we're going to just assign an existing material number two what I'm going to do that I'm just going to go into the hypershade I'm going to rename this let's go M underscore branches one thing I will tell you as I'm doing this you should rename yours whenever you tap something in this box if you don't press ENTER when you're done it crashes in Maya 2016 hopefully in 2017 they fix that cut I hope so but just be aware because it's soul-destroying when Maya loses all your work for you okay so done that right so let me just get rid of that background image and you can see that the entire image has been applied to it which is not what we want but we're going to sort each one of these out in a sec so that's just a scientistic material branches not selected first assign existing material branches assign existing material branches assign existing material branches matte so they're all ready to go so we'll start with this one in the bottom corner and we'll look at UV in these so going to go to UV UV editor let's see what we've got okay so you can see it starts as a plane which is what we started with so it makes sense that that's what it would look like but that doesn't resemble the ship we've created here so we could deal with remapping this so that it creates the that we've got there okay so to do this we're going to do a planar projection so click on this and we're going to do it on the y-axis because that's the one that's looking down which is the the right direction for a so click on project and it gives us this shape here which should be the shape of the leaf and you can see that it is that bit just going down there is this bit here so we've got to get that so that it is lined up now with that image so let's first of all try and get it the right dimensions always close to the right dimensions as we can and we're just going to have to do a little bit of moving these points around the M this is sort of rotated itself so we're going to put this into UV mode and I'm just going to pretty much repeat the process that I just went through and you'll see that it's coming together in the viewport over here to resemble the way it should it's just about putting these points in pretty much the same place as there were when we traced it so that one goes about here is where I put it it's getting nice and close though now that this one needs to go up here yeah okay that's pretty nice so that's the first branch done so let's do another one together and then I'll leave you to do the other two so we're going to do this middle one in here so let's put it into object mode I'm going to do a planar projection they'll go and straight away again we can see that this is not quite the right size and shape so let's do our best to scale this down like that okay we'll just zoom in on this so I can see what I'm doing okay so let's go for scaling up in that direction okay try and put the points as close to the right place as I can and I might just get away with scaling this one actually I shouldn't have to move and the individual UVs like I did for the other one yeah there are knots okay so I should put that into object mode make sure that I'm happy with it yes I've now got two branches complete okay so as we did when we were tracing these I'll leave you to do the UV mapping of the other two and then once those are done we'll look at the next step which is about shaping those branches so they look nice and believable you you can see I've now got four individual branches that I can mess around with which is lovely that's what I wanted so we can close the UV editor for now and what we're going to want to do next is reshape these so they look a little bit more branching so let's have a look at how we can do that in the perspective view with this one for instance so let's put it into vertex mode and we just want to reshape this a little bit so I'm going to start with getting the vertices on the sides I'm going to move those down well not like that crazy that's going to give it that kind of that look that we're talking about earlier so that's pretty nice already I'm happy with that and then what we're going to do is still in vertex mode you're going to get these ones at the end and we're going to move those down and probably move it back in a little bit as well that just sort of kind of getting a rotation sort of vibe to it and I'll bring that one down mmm maybe not undone a little bit more and bring it in this way and that will allow me to just bring that one down so it creates a bit of a drooping effect I'll do the same with this one so let's get it into vertex mode okay let's just select the vertices around the side let's get it nice and grippy let's get these sort of hat down in a little bit in like that and then these three on the end yep pull that down and in maybe this one move down a little bit as well so it's nice and droopy oh yeah that's beautiful and branchy okay we'll do this one so into vertex mode let's get all the verse that we want so one those three and the one those three let's pull that down lovely I missed one so no I did I know what that so pull those down yeah that's nice enough and then we're going to set about shaping this same way that we've done with the other ones so let's move that down and back a bit and we'll get these on the end and move that down back in then this one here let's get a nice and droopy object mode or my flight object mode there we go so that's that branch and then the final one get it into vertex mode get all those verts that we want to move down yep yep yep yep I'm liking that what am i doing this one x scale then I love is I'll just to make that a bit more drastic and just give me a little bit more variation in the tree okay let's select all these move that down so that's all these move that down sort of one on the end moving down okay so you can see I've now got my four branches right at this stage just to make it a little bit easier for me to work with I'm just going to line these up so I want one there maybe do this by size as well so I'll rotate this one around like that put that on there and then I'll have this one over here and finally this one here champion okay so here are our four handsome-looking branches right what we're going to do next is set these up so they work to Sider the issue that you can have with branches is that you can import them into a game engine and you can tell the game engine that they're two-sided so usually polygons are one-sided and that means that there will render from one side and the other side they'll be see-through and you can tell something like Unreal Engine that they're to side and it will render the other side and I'll be identical to the side that is rendered but the problem is the normals so the direction the faces are facing affects us how light reacts with them and if you make them two-sided the normals are still facing the original direction so they don't lie properly so the best way to remedy that and we'll just try and do this with them all at once is we're going to duplicate them like that and then it's just getting nice and close on one of them we're going to move it down ever so slightly so let's do 0.05 minus 0.05 sorry and that will just move these copies down now you can see this is the shading problem Maya showing them is two-sided but it's given us a shading problem there's no color on this side and we like them to be seen from both below and above so in order to get that we're going to go to a mesh display and we're going to click on reverse and that reverses the normal direction so now we've got branches that can be seen by from both directions because we've got two copies of now that does double the amount of faces that we've used for these branches but if you want them to look any good you've not really got a choice on that one so that needed to happen right there are our branches what we're going to do next is combine each of them so we're going to do mesh combine and we'll do center pivot just to make it easier in a minute mesh combine modify center pivot mesh combine modify center pivot and mesh combine and modify center pivot okay so they're all ready to go but what we need is a way to attach them to the trunk of the tree now we could just do it with like attaching here but that it just won't look right so we're going to create a little bit of a shape that will connect this to the tree to be a bit more branch and then we're going to move on to the trunk so we're just going to do this for one of the branches and then we'll move on to making the trunk and doing some texturing and then we'll do some duplicating around to save some work and it will all be good okay so what we need to do is create a cylinder so let's have a new cylinder and we need to do some work on this cylinder because we don't want to be throwing this many faces away that's far too many who want this to be a really really simple shape because again we're going to be duplicating this around the tree and we don't want to throw any faces away unnecessarily because it's really wasteful so sub-divisional axis we're going to change that straight away that's going to become three and that will look very triangular but we're going to use a shading trick so that when this is much smaller in the tree well we'll assume that it's cylindrical which is good right let's also rotate this around so we're going to move it just for now 90 degrees well elongates it a little bit and that's a good start right let's just call this one branch now we can't call it on branch can we so they're already called branch which we call this one it kind of is a branch what we needed it more College storm stomps a good name right I want to get stomp lined up so let's plop him over here yep and then in the side view I just press for song see what doing no six sorry in the side view we want to just make sure that is in the right sort of place and facing importantly the right kind of angle there we go right so now it should just be a case of getting this shaped and to the right size so we're going to get these on vertex mode totaling this today vertex okay let's get those three verts there and we're going to bring them together to form a bit of a point and then we're going to move these so that they are kind of nicely attaching to this branch and we're going to try a thing and match the thickness mostly now let's go a bit smaller actually and we'll just overlap okay and then these vertices over here we're just going to move over to the side of it so it's in a straight line didn't get them all ah what am i doing okay move those over a little bit like that let's scale them in and that is not enough about that let's just make that a bit shorter okay I think that'll do so that's going to be our branch we're not throwing many faces away on that that looks okay and what we're just going to do about this hard edge because it's very hard is we're going to click on mesh display and we're going to do soften edge and it should now look a lot softer it still does look a little bit sharp but believe me you won't see that when when we put it in the tree because there'll be a lot going on right so that's the branch made the stump stumpy branch what we need to do now is make the trunk of the tree and then it's all about texturing the tree and the stump and assembling it all together so we're getting there the the finishing line is in sight which is good because it's like quite a past 10:00 at night usually in bed by now am i doing right let's move all these branches out of the way let's build as a tree so we'll have a new cylinder I'm going to call this one trunk and subdivision axis we're going to start with 6 and the height this bad boy is going to be 700 it's a nice tall tree you can see at the moment that's part to skinny and we're going to do we're going to move this up on Y by 350 that's rotate with a move this up on Y pay about 350 there we go right and then we need to put a little bit of thickness in this bad boy you see a little bit more than that so I'm just hoping the radius I think I need to go for about you see yeah like that that's a good starting point so my radius of started with is seven point four so about seven and a half okay so that's all right and then what we need to do is get that thinned out at the top because these trees as you've seen at the beginning of the video at the beginning of the tutorial and they get thinner at the top so let's select all the verts and we're just going to scale these in wofe missed one try again mr. try again there we go scale them in to form a point that's pretty pointy object mode yeah that's alright and then we need to do a little bit of work on the bottom just to make this look like it is a tree so I'll go back to the multi-cut tool and we're going to hold control okay so at the bottom is tree we're going to need a few edge loops so I'm going to put and that I want to be as careful as I can about not using too many but I do need this tree to flare out a little bit at the bottom so I think I'm going to give myself three edge loops to do about okay I'm going to go into edge mode now and we will select this I thought let's do all the edges at once oh not first not right up on that one and that one and I'm just going to scale that in quite drastically at first and then let's scale that in not quite as much and then just this real at the top all I'm doing just this one but I think this one I'm going to bring down a little bit and this one yeah okay so you see now I've got this sort of flare and effect going on the bomb I'm also going to go into vertex mode and I'm just going to adjust some of these vertices to make it look like it's got roots going on really so let's just move some of these around just to make the bottom of the tree a little bit more interesting is that one out there okay so happy with that let's have a look at what the the trees looking like overall yeah okay that's pretty good okay so I think to keep it simple that will be a good enough trunk I'm happy with that so now what we need to do is some texturing and some UV mapping so we're going to do first of all is we're not work quite hard to get the UV set up on this trunk nice and even so we're going to assign a new material we'll do it as a Lambert and the color instead of using the actual bark texture we're not going to go that far you're going to use this checker pattern so let's see what last one you can see that is not good what we're really looking for is nice small squares on this so we need to set this up to give us that so we're going to select we're going to select the trunk now and then we're going to go to our UV editor to see what we're working with and actually that's not bad but I think we can do a little bit better so let's do a UV map so I'm going to start with a automatic map and that will better represent the shape of the tree that we've created so there it as you can see I'm going to put this into edge mode and we need to get this to be one continuous unwrap really and you can see it's been split into parts so we're just going to have one seam going down the the tree we're going to set that up so we're looking for edges that need connected so that edge there clear the knees character so we're going to go polygons moving so edges and that'll put those two together and I can see there's another two edges there so moving so those and there's one more to do polygons move and sell and that is basically the the tree you see down the bottom we've got the shape because it differed and that might have a bit of an effect on the tree that we've created on the UVs so we'll we'll see how that goes that there represents the bottom of the tree which we actually don't need to worry about I'm not sure where the top has been pop I assume it's up here somewhere well maybe the top and bottom are overlapping that's not really an issue anyways just the sides that we need to worry about so I'm now going to just put this into shell mode I'm going to get this tool here which is the optimized UV tool and what this does is it's getting that big brush is it resizes the UVs so that you get nice even squares usually it's not always perfect but it does give quite a bit of it so I'm just painting this like that okay so now what we'll do is we're going to just press W to get rid of that tool I'm going to put it into shell mode and I want nice like so they want nice small squares on this so I'm going to scale this up until I'm getting some squares okay that is actually not seeing you see nope you can see that I'm getting squares and squares are what I wanted to see I didn't want to see rectangles so let's check down the bottom see if there are any rectangles going on there it's a long way down this tree so the tallest tree ever what convinced it's going to be thick enough and I need to change that layer okay so down at the bottom I think that's where the seam is hopefully it's nice and continuously well so it's a little bit see me at the bottom which is not ideal so let's just go back down here and see if there's anything we can do about that it might be that some edges needs sewing together and I think that is the case so let's put this into edge mode a lot for any yeah so this savages here need sewing together so we'll do move and sell and the same for these so you can sell those and here so just need to make sure that they aren't what's going on here just need to make sure that they are all nice to song together so move and sell and then I'm going to bring in my optimized UV brush again I'll just get a bigger brush and this want to make sure that is nice and optimized okay that's not amazing so I've still got this scene here which is not great but overall I think we'll get away with that so that's the tree UV map so you can see that the the squares do get bigger as you move further up the tree but thankfully because of the fact that the trees are going to be high you won't really see that so that's nice enough I think for the trunk of the tree or that we need to do now is find those leaves and we're just going to UV map this so this is what the the mapping looks like at the moment let's just assign that check a texture to it so a sign existing material at the lumber 3 that actually isn't bad I'm going to put it into shell mode let's scale this up so there is going to be some distortion because of the way that we pulled those together but nothing that's pretty nice so you can see that's now we've got nice squares on there they're ready for the material so let's make that material and assign it and then we'll be ready to put the branches on the trip so we're going to sign a new material to this a new Lambert will call this lumber bark and for the color I'm going to choose a file and it's going to be what do we call it it's that one there isn't it the seamless pine bark and there we go that's now going on there that looks okay I'm happy enough with that okay well apply that one to this assigned existing material bark make sure that I'm happy with it I'm just get these vertices free and goes up them yeah I think up close that looks okay so now we need to get some branches on this tree so we just need to finish putting these branches together so let's find this we need to duplicate this so that each one of these branches has got one so let's duplicate that and hopefully if we go to the top view you should all be in roughly the same place so it shouldn't be difficult to attach one of these branches like that so happy enough with all of those now obviously if I was being really careful about this I'd made sure that the color of the bark matched but again this is actually quite a forgiving tree to make so I think I'll get away with that right now let's make each one of these branches ready to attach so we're going to go to soft slit to the stump and the the main branch we're going to go mesh combine and then I'm going to go to modify center pivot but actually don't want to Center the pivot what I want to do so I'm going to press D which puts you into pivot move mode I'm going to press of e because that snaps to vertex I'm just going to snap that to that vertex I'm just going to move into my perspective view up because as you can see press DMV again that wasn't quite in the right place so now I've got my pivot point so that I'll make it a lot easier when I'm attaching those branches I need to repeat this for the other four branches so it's going to be mesh combined do modify center pivot just to get that a bit closer DMV let's bring that over here and over here in VA let's move it up yep that's pretty close let's get this one mesh combined modify center pivot and then we're going to move that pivot to the right place or as close as we can get it I'll do and one final one to do mesh combine modify center pivot and then it's going to be DMV let's pull that over here yup that's at the right place pull it up I'm going to change angle nowhere near no any are we doing yeah that'll do okay so we've now got one two three four branches okay each one of these branches has got a lot of history going on so I'm going to slip them all muddy fine they'll edit delete by type history and so they've not got really good name so let's rename these in so our branch one branch to branch three branch four what we need to do now is arrange these branches on the tree so we'll do that in the next step okay so at the bottom of this tree we're going to have some really kind of piddly branches so let's go control and D so I'm going to leave my four original branches here so I can always find them and we're going to just move a way up the tree yeah about there I think these branches don't start right at the bottom and then we just need to get this first one in place so we'll move up to about there yeah it's okay make sure I'm happy with the angle of it so I think down the bottom I'm going to have them just pointing down a little bit more right so at the bottom they are going to be quite small so I'm going to allow that one to stay that kind of size I'm a duplicate of this swing it around swing you around a bit further than that think and then move this into place so what I found I was actually surrounded by pine trees the other day is they actually kind of grow in level so you get one so if this is you this is a drunk you get them growing around the level and then they could leave it for a bit and then they grow around another level so they grow in stages which is nice it makes it a bit easier for putting together trees for what we're doing okay so now I'm going to get this one and I've duplicated it I'm just going to put it in the tree okay so we need this to be in sort of the right place again so I'm probably going to go around about five or six per level I think so yeah like that one I just need to move it out of the tree a little bit so we can see the branch that's okay I think I'll have another one of these on this level you can go over there and let's just move that one to the right place definitely you want coming out of here I think so let's look for that I think we'll have this one so let's try and move this into place like so okay yep yeah yeah yeah okay what's the height looking like yeah pretty close I'm just going to rotate this one down a little bit okay so that's my first sort of level of branches and it doesn't quite look even though let's just we'll take that down a little bit more rotate this one down a bit more as well yeah I'm happy enough with that so you say I'm leaving a little bit bear here but these trees are very random so I want to try and capture that right I haven't used this branch yet so let's have that one on the next level so I'm going to leave I think they sort of have about that much of a gap between each level so let's give that one a go and they're going to get a little bit bigger on this level as well so let's just make sure I'm happy with the position of this one yep and then what I'm going to do is duplicate some of these all and move them around right that is at a funny angle so let's do modify freeze transformations that will allow me to just rotate it okay I really want to deal with that bear area there on this level so let's move up and then we'll move that out yep yep yep so it's kind of now all a case of arranging branches which it gets tedious aren't a lie it is a very tedious thing to do but when you've got a sexy-looking tree at the end it's worth it I would argue it's worth it anyway still modify freeze transformations just so that I'm going to get a good rotation on this yeah it looks ok let's have a bit of rotation on it just to mix it up a bit and we'll have this one move that one up I'm just going to move this one around a touch I'm going over there for just have one more we'll have a small one or smallish oh yeah I'll be okay so you can see that's now coming together I'm not quite happy with how dense that's going on the mover down a little bit it's bad so I've now got two rows of those branches I'm going to do a third rail again I'm gonna try and be a bit random about this but then I'm just going to start duplicating branches willy-nilly and see what I end up with because I'm impatient like that okay so we'll have this one next I'll just try and get a fairly consistent sort of yeah that's good okay let's have that one rotated right around the other side we'll just stick it out there yep let's get a bit of rotation going on I like it I like it like this one duplicate that move it up let's get some rotation going on on this one you need to get a bit closer on that and get sticking out the tree here there we go so that's looking nice let's just move that up a little bit more okay I want this branch next let's duplicate that up to there rotate it around a bit and then we'll move that in so it's not sticking out the tree again yeah we definitely need at least one more branch on this one duplicate this one around and I'm going to have two quite similar next to each other keep it nice and random I'll have that one quite a bit smaller for now anyway and let's have this one on up here as well okay so what I'm now going to do is I'm going to try and be a bit lazy about this let's duplicate all of those move up and then see if we can get away with rotating those all around a bit okay now let's get all of these let's duplicate them up like that let's now add a bit more rotation to this just to randomize it a bit so we don't want this looking the same and then I'm going to do this one more time go out there and let's get a bit more rotation going on maybe I'll just choose a different direction on that one as well just to mix things up I think I can probably do this one more time so let's duplicate again move all of these up like that now of course at the moment that's going to lock all kinds of wrong yeah don't really want to go any higher than that so what I'm going to do put this into vertex mode I'm just going to now change the height of the tree of it that should be okay okay so let's put that into object mode and now I want to make this a reference as well for a little while because I don't want to accidentally select this while I'm working on the branches so what is this layers create layer from selected let's call this trunk or lair underscore trunk like that we'll save that lets reference that layer right now what these branches tend to do is they get a little bit of butcher as they go up and they kind of come back in again as they hit the top so what I'm going to do to try and emulate that is on the slit this many and I'm going to scale them up a touch and then I must let this many and scale them up a touch and this many let's cut them up a touch from this many scale them up a touch and now anywhere where I'm not particularly happy I'm just going to make them a bit bigger like that I think we need a little bit more going on down here yep that's not bad I'm not happening happy with the thickness of my trunk if I'm honest I think that doesn't look quite thick enough so let's just bring that up a bit I might be bit too much okay now I want to do is just put some rotation on some of these so I think I'm just going to select some at random and do stuff all not that much do stuff with them don't know the trunk wise on a reference anymore okay let's get these ones I'm just really getting random selections of half or random ish and just doing things with them there we go ah too much okay I'm not too happy with this section here so I'm going to scale these up a bit and there we go it looks pretty good so I think overall let's just scale them all up so the last thing we need to do is just slept on the trunk we can't because it's reference select on the trunk and do mesh display soften edge and that will just soften that up so now if we were a player ground level we'd be able to look up at this and we get a nice bushy awesome trick so this will work in game it'll be beautiful it's ready to go what we're not going to cover in this tutorial though is what you would do with the normal maps what you would do with the roughness maps how you would import into game if you are interested in that then if you click on the link on-screen then that will take you to my creating game art tutorial series this is a series that takes you through the process of creating a game environment using Unreal Engine and Maya so you'll create all of your assets you'll create all of the different texture maps you'll put them into a real you'll create the really six image you'll place them around and you'll be able to create something like what you see on screen and if I haven't finished that yet you'll be taken to a link that you can be notified when it's complete if it is finished you'll be taken to the link to get that tutorial right special thanks to my patrons that helped me get these tutorials made so I'm going to pop their names on-screen so that they get in all the thanks they deserve cheers guys thank you for your support and if you're not a patron then please consider becoming one I do put a lot of effort into making these tutorials I don't know if it came across on this one it is really late maybe I should only do these indeed if you've enjoyed the tutorial then please hit that subscribe button that's what it's there for and you'll be able to find me other tutorials I've got a lot more stuff coming up so make sure you are subscribed for that if you've learned a lot about making trees from this tutorial then hit the like button and leave a comment below as well if you've made any trees using this method then send me a link to what you've made I'm always interested to see what people have made based on hi tutorials and that's it guys I hope you liked it I'll make another one soon thanks for watching bye

Channel: Game Dev Academy

Views: 32,775

Rating: 4.901082 out of 5

Keywords: maya tree tutorial, how to make a tree in maya, how to model a tree in maya, how to model a realistic tree in maya, pine tree, evergreen, fir, douglas, game ready, maya, maya tutorial, tutorial, tree, maya for beginners, maya tutorials, alpha, texture, uv, map, mapping, low poly, low polygon

Id: bptgzWCzZMg

Length: 70min 6sec (4206 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2016